Portable communication receivers, and more particularly pagers, have offered a variety of features which enhance their versatility, but at the expense of requiring some form of user intervention to initiate or enable these features. Features, such as for example multiple frequency operation, multiple addresses, group call addresses, mail drop addresses, silent alerting features and others, have been provided which have added extensive versatility to the portable communications receivers or pagers. Many of these features can be categorized as work related and non-work related, i.e. frequencies and addresses on which contact may be made during the day when the user is at work, versus those which may be specified during the evening when the user is at home. In other instances, these same features might be categorized as on-site and area wide, i.e. when the user is in the office or plant receiving pages or messages on an on-site or local system or frequency, versus when the user is away from the office or plant and receiving the pages or messages on an area wide system or frequency. In situations such as these, the user had to keep track of those frequencies or addresses on which messages would be received during the day or evening, or when the user was in the office or out of the office. Selection of operating frequencies in these instances were often accomplished by a switch to select the appropriate frequency of operation. Address selection was either by the use of a switch or by restricting who was given a particular address for day and evening operation. Consequently, if the user failed to switch to a different frequency when he left the office, pages directed to him on the area wide system could be missed. Also, failure to switch the pager to a non-work related or off duty mode could result in pages missed, or in the case of selective dissemination of the user's address for day or evening operation, would result in receiving pages which the user desired to not receive at those particular times.